Making Round Glass Bead

Series Summary

Glass bead jewelry starts with creating just one glass bead. Artists create glass beads by using a torch to heat glass on a mandrel and shape the glass with tools and gravity. From earrings and bracelets to single stranded and elaborate multi-stranded necklaces, creating glass bead jewelry is fun, easy to learn, and builds artistic skill. All it takes is the desire to create, the willingness to learn, and finally practicing your newly acquired craft. See how to make glass beads in this free video series featuring artist Teresa Metcalfe-Johnson. Teresa will demonstrate how to heat glass to make beads, how to add glass to a glass bead, how to add frit to glass beads, how to encase a glass bead, how to shape a glass bead, how to round a glass bead, how to create flowers on a glass bead, how to melt glass dots on a glass bead, and how to melt Cubic Zirconia to a glass bead.

Video Transcript

"Alright, what we're going to do first is make a basic, round bead. The first thing you're going to want to do is remember to figure out what the inside diameter of that bead is going to be and choose your mandril accordingly. I've decided that I want the inside diameter of my bead to be about an eighth of an inch. That way I can slip it on a thicker chain or a thick leather cord. So what you want to do, as you heat the mandril, is start from the tip down and you want to start in the back of the flame and slowly bring it down closer to the head of the torch. As you do that, you want to make sure that you rotate the mandril at all times. You'll see that the bead release will change from a chalky-gray color to an orange color. You want to make sure that you heat the mandril all the way through, all the way to the bottom. If you don't head your bead release evenly what will happen is bead release will break off of the mandril and if bead release breaks off of that mandril, you can have a piece of glass stuck to the mandril that you'll never be able to wear."